Beyond Well-Intentioned: An HCI Students’ Ethical Assessment of Their Own XR Designs

Foreseeing the impact of augmented and virtual reality applications on users and society is challenging. Thus, efforts to establish an ethical mindset and include technology assessment techniques in HCI education are increasing. However, XR educational courses fostering students’ reasoning and perceived responsibility in designing ethical applications are lacking. We, therefore, developed the explorative design method Reality Composer to investigate and foster the students’ assessment of the ethical impact of and responsibilities in XR application design. We conducted a workshop with 40 international HCI master students applying this method and analyzed the resulting application concepts regarding the students’ ethical assessment. Our findings show that they critically discussed their concepts’ impact and identified potential countermeasures for negative social implications. However, they overestimated the users’ responsibility to securely use XR applications as well as a positive design intention. We contribute with our findings and developed method to understand students’ potential and derive future course design implications.